Murder at the Campfire Cookout

Title: Murder at the Campfire Cookout
Author: Darci Hannah
Published: June 30, 2026 by Kensington Cozies
Format: Kindle, 352 Pages
Genre: Amateur Sleuth
Series: Beacon Bakeshop Mysteries #7

Blurb: Converting the old Beacon Point lighthouse into a bakery is as adventurous as Lindsey cares to get. Her mother, Ellie, a former 80s fashion model, likes her creature comforts even more—until she sees a business opportunity for her Beacon Harbor fashion boutique when she’s invited by the Mitten Kittens Glamping Club on a woodsy getaway.

Far from roughing it, the ladies will be warm and cozy in chic vintage campers. Ellie insists Lindsey come along to win the campfire cookout contest. Campfire cooking has come a long way from bacon and beans. Soon Lindsey is making pizza, berry cobbler, and gooey Carmelita camping bars.

But the festive spirit is soon dampened when a body is found in Ellie’s camper. It seems like an accidental death until everyone’s tires are slashed and it’s clear the glampsite has become a crime scene. With no cell service to call for help, it’s up to Lindsey to smoke out the killer around the campfire.

My Opinion: Murder at the Campfire Cookout feels like the series bowing out with a sigh rather than a flourish. Darci Hannah hints that it will be the last in the series, but that Beacon Bakeshop crew may wander into future projects, which is a comforting thought; this particular outing doesn’t quite honor the charm the series started with.

Let’s start with the word that nearly derailed my reading experience: glamping. I swear it appears roughly 137 times, give or take a few eye rolls. It’s one of those words that never quite settles on the page, and the constant repetition made the prose feel clunky and the pacing even slower than it already was.

And the plotting… oof. Monotonous is the kindest way to put it. The premise alone had me blinking at the page: a group of women casually agreeing to let a fellow camper load a dead body into the back of a car and send one lone driver off into the night toward a hospital mortuary they can’t locate that must be somewhere down a dark, winding road. With zero questions. I mean—really? I can suspend disbelief with the best of them, but I draw the line at characters behaving as if they’ve never seen a crime show. Let alone have common sense.

The writing itself doesn’t feel like the earlier books either. It’s choppy, repetitive, and oddly flat, as if the series’ usual spark got left behind at the bakeshop. By the halfway point, the story starts giving off And Then There Were None vibes, but without the tension, the cleverness, or the creeping dread. It’s easy to spot the intended victim, and the perpetrator comes across less like a mastermind and more like someone who wandered into the plot by accident.

By the final stretch, the book feels endless. Then suddenly—whiplash—the ending rushes in with no surprises, no clever misdirection, no “oh, that’s why!” moment. The target is obvious from page one, the motive barely matters, and the last chapters feel like the author was grasping at anything to wrap things up. I found myself wanting it to be over, which is never how I want to feel at the end of a cozy mystery series.

If this truly is the last Beacon Bakeshop book, I wish it had gone out with a bit more finesse.

The Shape of Water

Title: The Shape of Water
Author: Andrea Camilleri
Published: May 31, 2005 by Penguin Books
Format: Hardcover, 218 Pages
Genre: Police Procedural
Series: Commissario Montalbano #1

Blurb: The Shape of Water is the first in Andrea Camilleri's wry, brilliantly compelling Sicilian crime series, featuring Inspector Montalbano.

The goats of Vigàta once grazed on the trash-strewn site still known as the Pasture. Now local enterprise of a different sort flourishes: drug dealers and prostitutes of every flavour. But their discreet trade is upset when two employees of the Splendour Refuse Collection Company discover the body of engineer Silvio Luparello, one of the local movers and shakers, apparently deceased in flagrante at the Pasture. The coroner's verdict is death from natural causes - refreshingly unusual for Sicily.

But Inspector Salvo Montalbano, as honest as he is streetwise and as scathing to fools and villains as he is compassionate to their victims, is not ready to close the case - even though he's being pressured by Vigàta's police chief, judge, and bishop.

Picking his way through a labyrinth of high-comedy corruption, delicious meals, vendetta firepower, and carefully planted false clues, Montalbano can be relied on, whatever the cost, to get to the heart of the matter.

My Opinion: I’d decided my poor, neglected shelf of older books deserved some attention, so I reached for The Shape of Water. In hindsight… I probably should’ve let that shelf continue gathering dust. I blame the cover entirely. That blue ocean? It whispered vacation promises it absolutely did not keep.

Published in 2005, the book shows its age in ways that aren’t charming. The language used to describe women made me wince more than once. And because it’s short, you’d think it would at least move briskly. It does not. This is the first in a 28 book series, and honestly, I cannot fathom how anyone made it to book two, let alone book twenty eight.

We follow Salvo Montalbano, Vigàta’s most respected detective, as he’s called in to investigate the death of a prominent citizen. On paper, that sounds promising. In practice, the story starts slow and then stays that way. There’s humor, some bumbling characters, a bit of moral corner cutting “for the greater good,” and flashes of personality that hint at why the series has fans. But for me, it all blended into a kind of monotone hum which was never a DNF, just relentlessly meh.

By the halfway point, I found myself more invested in the fact that I was clearing another long ignored book from my shelf than in the mystery itself. And that’s never a great sign.

Will I be continuing with the series? Absolutely not. But I will give myself credit for finally reading it and freeing up that little square of shelf space. Sometimes the victory is simply finishing the thing.

My Husband's Wife

Title: My Husband's Wife
Author: Alice Feeney
Published: January 20, 2026 by Flatiron Books: Pine & Cedar
Format: Hardcover, 310 Pages
Genre: Psychological Thriller

Blurb: Eden Fox, an artist on the brink of her big break, sets off for a run before her first exhibition. When she returns to the home she recently moved into—Spyglass, an enchanting old house in Hope Falls—nothing is as it should be. Her key doesn't fit. A woman, eerily similar to her, answers the door. And her husband insists that this stranger is his wife. One house. One husband. Two women. Someone is lying. Six months earlier, a reclusive Londoner named Birdy, reeling from a life-changing diagnosis, inherits Spyglass. This unexpected gift from a long-lost grandmother brings her to the pretty seaside village of Hope Falls. But then Birdy stumbles upon a shadowy London clinic that claims to be able to predict a person's date of death, including her own.

My Opinion: My Husband’s Wife was my first Alice Feeney, so I went in with that cautious curiosity you get when you’re testing out a new thriller author. Only a few pages, I told myself, to see if her style was for me. Famous last words. Within a handful of chapters, I thought I had a decent grasp on what was happening. By chapter twenty, I was staring at the page thinking: Nope. Absolutely not. None of this connects. I am lost in the best, most chaotic way.

This book is a fast, twisty, deceptively easy read. The kind that grabs hold of a brain like mine, the kind that loves lining up puzzle pieces and connecting dots. Except Feeney keeps snatching the pieces back and swapping them out when you’re not looking. A third of the way through, I realized I wasn’t just reading a psychological thriller; I was in the middle of a full blown narrative labyrinth. The beginning already had me pausing to think, to rearrange theories, to mutter “Wait, what?” under my breath—but by that point, I knew I was strapped in for a ride.

And the questions. Oh, the questions.

Who is really the wife?

Who is the artist?

Where does the daughter fit into all of this?

Why does every answer feel like it’s lying to me?

The husband, well, he’s a whole situation. His big revelation was another twist in a book already full of them. And just when you think you’ve found someone you can trust, the police officer starts acting suspicious, and the new detective feels like she’s hiding something too. It’s like Feeney looked at the concept of “reliable characters” and said, “Absolutely not.”

Then you reach the end; the reader is hit with one final tailspin. The kind that makes you sit there blinking at the wall, replaying the entire book in your head, trying to figure out what you missed and how she managed to outmaneuver you, yet again.

To say I loved every moment feels like an understatement. I picked this up intending to sample a few pages, maybe decide whether Alice Feeney was an author I’d continue with. Instead, I found myself glued to the book, thinking about it even when I wasn’t reading, trying to decode what she was really telling me. And when I finally finished, I realized I hadn’t written down half the thoughts I meant to, and all I could do was sit there, stunned, trying to process the beautiful chaos I’d just experienced.

If this is what Alice Feeney does, then yes, she’s absolutely for me.

The Antiquarian's Object of Desire

Title: The Antiquarian's Object of Desire
Author: India Holton
Published: April 21, 2026 by Berkley
Format: Kindle, Paperback 368 Pages
Genre: Fantasy
Series: Love's Academic (#3)

Blurb: Magical-antique experts Amelia Tarrant and Caleb Sterling have been best friends forever, although lately each has begun secretly wishing for more than friendship. But when rumors about their relationship spread, they're forced to fake being enemies to protect their reputations and keep their jobs.

The resulting arguments spark havoc across Oxford University, and when they cause an explosion while fighting over a magical antique, it’s the final straw for their exasperated faculty head. He dispatches them to a job in Cumbria where even they can’t get into trouble.

Which proves just how wrong one man can be. In a stormbound old manor house, Amelia and Caleb face magical mayhem and rampaging ghosts that make the previous havoc look mild in comparison. Most troublesome of all, though, is the secret of how they feel about each other. When it comes to tackling deadly antiques, hiding the truth in their hearts could destroy them for real.

My Opinion: From the very first chapter, this novel sets the stage for fun with laugh-out-loud moments, in addition to a few unexpectedly tender moments that catch you off guard. It’s part of the charm. Holton herself calls this book a “fantasy rom com” starring characters who have apparently been loitering in the back of her imagination for years. And honestly? You can feel that. These two have been patiently waiting to get onto the page.

At the center of the story is one of my favorite tropes: fake hating. Not enemies to lovers, not rivals; no, these are two best friends who have to pretend to despise each other for the sake of academic survival. Dr. Amelia Tarrant, antiquarian and Oxford history professor, is fighting to keep her job. Dr. Caleb Sterling, her equally brilliant counterpart, is fighting the urge to leap to her defense every time a roomful of men calls her a tyrant. (He would like to file a complaint with HR on her behalf, preferably while holding her hand.)

Unfortunately for them, the Oxford faculty has grown weary of their constant bickering- real or otherwise- and exiles them to a remote, crumbling manor house. This is where things get complicated. The house is full of magical antiquities that react to the pair’s… let’s call it “chemistry.” Ghosts rampage. Objects misbehave. Spoons develop opinions. And every time Amelia and Caleb try to maintain their façade of mutual disdain, the universe (and one very chaotic utensil) seems determined to expose the truth.

Holton blends magic into a historical setting with the same ease she blends humor with longing. One minute you’re laughing at a possessed household item; the next you’re swept up in Amelia’s fierce determination to protect what’s hers -- her career, her research, her sense of self. And layered over all of that is a mystery involving a thief, a college in peril, and the kind of banter that makes you want to highlight entire pages.

I adored the first book in this series (The Ornithologist’s Field Guide to Love). The second one (The Geographer’s Map to Romance) didn’t quite hit the same high for me. But this one? This one brings back the spark, the charm, and the irresistible pull of the first. Even though the books are technically part of a series, they read more like interconnected standalones with each adding its own flavor, its own magic, and its own beating heart.

The only sad part? This appears to be the final book in the series. And while the ending is satisfying, I’m still a little bereft knowing we won’t get another round of magical academia, misbehaving artifacts, and Holton’s signature blend of wit and whimsy.